Applied Creativity

Learning Loss: No one ever imagined that we would still be locked down in September. September means back to school. New backpacks and shoes for the kids, and we teachers sigh to say good bye to the summer, but there are fresh bulletin boards and ‘Welcome’ signs, new rosters, and classrooms that had the floors polished in the summer. September meant new beginnings, new kids, a renewed sense of purpose after resting all summer.  Not that year.  The schools had been shuttered since the March before when they told us all to go home.  ‘I thought it was Easter, not Christmas, I heard a teacher whisper when the principal told us our spring break would be extended another week, to two weeks, to you know, ‘flatten the curve’.  We all know the story now, yadda yadda, the kids of California never went back to the classroom that year.  Nor the next. I spent the last half of the 2020 school year sitting on the school yard asphalt by myself, surrounded with buckets of paint.  Most teachers had to start Zooming, but since I taught ESL that year, they told me I could just go home and collect my paycheck. The thought of getting free money for doing nothing was unfathomable to me (but I guess a lot of stuff that happened that year was) but also immoral, so I asked the principal what else I could do to help.  She gave me the perfect job of painting a giant map of the United States on the playground.

I sat, day after day, month after month alone, painting each individual state in a color palette of my choosing, my headphones on my head tuned in to Adam Carolla, the comedian I had listened to in the morning for years. He was a voice of sanity to me, my friend.  School officially ended that June along with my temporary job.  Painting the map of the states had inspired me to drive across this country of ours.  I wanted to see with my own eyes what was happening everywhere else.  I was prepared to drive alone, anything to get away from the irrational craziness I saw when I wasn’t in the refuge of my asphalt canvas.  I couldn’t bear to continue to witness the lines of masked people bracing themselves against the wind to get into the grocery stores, or physically fighting over toilet paper once they got in.  I had to get the hell out of Dodge.  The fact that the unelected health officer, Scott Marrow, told us to stay within five miles of our homes made the trip even more enticing. It couldn’t be like this everywhere.  My friend Merry ended up going with me.  ‘What if we die?’ she asked me before we left.  After all, we were going into the eye of the storm, the scary states that didn’t lock down, where covid floated in the air like a thick invisible blanket, they told us, where faces were obscenely seen because of the lack of masks. “Then we die,” I said. We didn’t die, and I was right.  The rest of the country wasn’t like us.  They all went back to school in September, rightly seeing the insanity of keeping kids at home staring into a computer. Not California. The 2020-2021 school year was upon us, and Newsom told us the schools were not opening, we had to continue to stay home to save lives.  Remote learning they called it. It was a joke. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but like the school year before, providence handed me the perfect job during that second Pandemic Lockdown School Year.  A one-room school house out in the country, as though my classroom was a cross between Little House on the Prairie and Charlotte’s Web, in a rough-hewn wooden barn.

One wall had a white board where I kept track of the fourteen kids complicated Zoom schedules, another wall had horseshoes nailed into it in such a way that the students could hang up their backpacks and coats, another wall I covered with the kids artwork, and the fourth wall was non-existent.  Like, there wasn’t one, the barn had three walls.  That meant that I had an unobstructed, open-air view of the rolling hills, dotted with horses separated by white ranch style fences, and the smell of fresh hay and manure wafted around my classroom.  The en plein air classroom was a draw for some of the parents of the students that ended up being in my ‘learning pod’ one of the pandemic concepts already fading from our collective memory, where it was said that a random number of kids, say a dozen or so, could be together and it was ‘safe’ especially if air was circulating, and boy did the air circulate there!  Most pods had to buy HVAC systems, but ours was natural.  As beautiful as a semi-outdoor classroom was, it also meant that many mornings were freezing cold, and getting the propane going on the one heater we had wasn’t always easy. Also, since we were on a dirt road, clouds of dust would float in and settle on everything whenever a car or horse went by. I’d gaze out at the hills and horses and tell the kids that ranged from kindergarteners through fourth grade, that they were the luckiest students in the whole state.  ‘Whoever gets their math done can go on the hayride!’  was my daily refrain meaning that some lucky kids got to ride around the ranch in the quad with Breen, my stepson, and owner of the Lazy H Ranch, and throw flakes of alfalfa in the feeding troughs. 

One corner of the barn had eggs in an incubator at the beginning of the year, and as the months went by, we watched the chicks hatch and eventually turn into four rust-colored teenage hens.  The chickens were like our kids that we had raised.  They wandered freely around the classroom clucking softly, and some of the kids liked to hold one of them in their lap grounding them to reality while they watched their teachers trying to explain math on their laptops.  The two barn dogs guarded us, but one always was licking his chops around the chickens, and the kids would scream at him to get away, until one day the dog came in the barn and I literally saw feathers come out of his mouth, like a cartoon.  We didn’t tell the kids for days that he ate one of the hens, and I privately cried. After ‘school’, we’d all go up to the hay loft and watch movies on a TV, and some of the kids would jump out the opening holding a rope, and land in the pile of soft hay below.  Two giant tire swings hung in the trees further up the hill, a thrilling ride where up to four kids could comfortably sit and spin dizzily around holding on to the thick chains. The kids all got riding lessons on ponies in the coral for their afterschool program.

I was in an idyllic world, far from the ugliness of the lockdowns and people’s reaction to them. No television blaring propaganda, no radio to tell us to be scared. All it took was a mile or two to get out of town and completely change my reality into that of country living in the old days. The Zoom teaching made me sad though. The Chromebook laptops were the worst part. I remember the sight of one kindergarten girl named Steele diligently doing jumping jacks solo out in the courtyard behind the barn for ‘P.E.’ while staring at the computer.  A long-awaited annual fourth grade field trip to the Sanchez Adobe was watched by the kids on the computer while they pretended that they were making the mud bricks they usually got to make with their hands. Breen’s son, Chinny, in his senior year, wandered in and out of the barn.  He usually stayed in bed until noon, watching his high school classes on his phone in bed.  He missed most of his long-awaited football season, his prom, and his graduation, although the moms tried the best they could to make facsimiles, it wasn’t of course the same, the sadness was obvious in his eyes. I was privy to see how more than a dozen teachers interpreted ‘teaching’ during the lockdown.   I saw some teachers showing up over the Zoom every day, well, actually only four days a week, because they called Wednesdays ‘asynchronous learning’ a euphemism in the New Speak that meant ‘you’re on your own kid, and yahoo, the teachers get a day off’.  Other teachers just directed their kids to watch videos, and sent home thick packets of busy work.  I heard one kindergarten teacher tell the kids to go outside and observe nature for their science lesson. That school year went by like I was in a dream.  At the beginning, in September, we survived the ‘black day’ when the smoke from the fires was so thick the sun never came out, by hiking up to the ridge with flashlights, and watched the traffic below, the headlights barely visible. We made applesauce and carved pumpkins, and Santa and the Grinch made surprise appearances at Christmas.  In the spring we planted flowers in decorated pots for Mother’s Day, and at the end we held a formal graduation, complete with graduation caps that the kids made themselves.

Twelve years ago I visited China. I was teaching ancient civilizations to middle school kids at the time. When I saw the photo of the terra cotta warriors in the social studies textbook, I was blown away that such a spectacle could exist. Several football fields full of life-sized armies of clay soldiers, horses, musicians and acrobats, each with an individual face, had been unearthed in 1974, I learned. I vowed to someday see these statues in real life. When serendipitously I heard of a group that took teachers to China for a two-week tour for free, I jumped at the chance.

I was a little in love with China back then. It was the time in my life when I starting to explore Buddhism and meditation, so teaching sixth graders about China fishtailed with my own interests. I loved the philosophy of Confucius. The yin yang symbol was cool and popular at the time, plastered on skateboards or dangling from earrings, and I loved learning the real meaning of the light side of the hill and the dark side, and how both were inherent in everything. I loved The Tao of Pooh, and started studying the Tao in earnest. I started going to an acupuncturist if I felt bad, or even if I felt good. I loved Chinese calligraphy and watercolors, and started taking classes to learn the art and the meditation of their pictographs. I painted the Chinese symbol for love in my bedroom. I got my first tattoo, the Chinese symbol for truth, on my ankle.

I was excited when I learned about our whirlwind itinerary. The group of twenty teachers would visit Xian, the sight of the warriors I wanted to see, as well Beijing. We would go on a cruise down the Yangtze River and see the Olympic stadium, a Chinese ballet, the Great Wall, and a whole host of activities the first week, and the second week we would study the history and culture of China in order to bring back information to our students. We would be required to take Chinese lessons online before we went, way before Zoom was ever invented. In order to have our trip paid for, we were required to be observed teaching lessons regarding the trip to our class upon our return. After my visit, I hated China, and vowed never to return. I realized early into the tour that entire two-week trip was nothing more than a giant propaganda brainwashing of us teachers, so we could take their views back to the states and indoctrinate our students. The first week we were treated with luxury, including five star hotels, the finest cuisine of each region, the touring of the best schools, evening entertainment, and a cruise complete with a doctor cupping us. The pace was such, that we were exhausted and satiated, with little time to think. Week two found us in barrack like dorms, where we attended class every day to have the history of communist China rewritten for us from their perspective. I could feel the presence of Chairman Mao and his authoritative government everywhere I went. We were taken to bookstores where our guides took notes on what we read. In Tiananmen Square no mention was made of the protests or the protesters that were killed. We saw how the highways we traveled were beautifully landscaped with fresh flowers to impress us, but I could see the slums and shanty houses right beyond. The high school we visited was brand new, and apparently state of the art, but so shoddily and hastily built that the crumbling walls and leaking roofs were plainly apparent. We visited a museum that boasted of China's environmental program and initiatives, but the sky outside, that we saw with our own eyes, was never blue, only a sickly yellow. We saw where the Yangtze River Three Gorges dam was built, and how the government had no problem flooding the shores, displacing millions of farmers, and destroying ancient temples and artifacts. Although we visited one Buddhist temple, our tour guides told us that religion is frowned upon, because the more important focus of all the people was making money. I tried to talk one-on-one to the guides as much as possible, but they were tight lipped. I asked them about Google, and if they knew that their information was being censored. I asked them if they believed in God. I asked them if they minded giving up their kids, and only seeing them once a month in order for them to do their jobs. I asked them why people weren't allowed kiss in public. I wondered why people in hazmat suits with face shields and helmets took our temperature with those little guns on all our plane flights. I thought everyone was wearing masks because of the smog, but no, a flu was going around, but I had never heard of it, and when I got home I was in bed for two weeks with the only case of the flu that I have had in my adult life. Only then, did I learn about H1N1 or the term 'Swine Flu'. The virus had followed me home. And now it's back. Everything I hated about China, the censorship, the authoritarian regime, the brainwashing, the fake news, the propaganda, the whitewashing of bad truth, the illness, the masks, the distancing, the smoky yellow sky, the lockdown, the rewriting of history, the focus on money, the discouraging of gathering and religion has permeated American soil. It's all here, along with their new ugly virus. The shocking part to me is how Americans so easily succumbed and even embraced, the ways of China.